Monday, April 18, 2005

Spyce active tags, version 2

(Updated with a little more explanation as to what's going on.)

The Spyce Active Tag compiler is coming along nicely. Spyce has had active tags since 1.3.0 (current active release is 1.3.13; it's very, very stable by now), but writing a tag library shares a lot of the problems that JSP 1.x tag libraries had; it takes a lot of code to get something done.

Now, I've updated the Spyce compiler to be able to compile tag libaries, and tied it in to the active handler feature as a bonus. Meaning, tags can wrapping their control logic together with the view so all the user has to write is a single tag, like "<chat:boxlet />" below. (You could put the controller logic into another module and write handler="foo.addLine" instead of self, but I'm keeping it simple here.)

Here's a simple example that defines and uses a chatbox component. Chat state is stored in the server globals area for simplicity. This code is running (for the next few days at least) over here. Update: original demo is down, but a slightly more sophisticated version (showing two chatboxes on the same page) is up at the spyce 2.0 prerelease site.

(I hope to get a beta of the next Spyce release (1.4? 2.0?) out later this week.)